Thursday, May 29, 2014

Back in December 2008, in an interview with Time's Richard Stengel, Obama set for himself what struck me as a "modest and ambitious agenda" to make a significant beginning on several long-term challenges. I posited in early 2012 that he'd done reasonably well by his own yardstick.

In an interview airing on NPR today, Obama set himself an ambitious set of benchmarks in a narrower range: not foreign policy per se, but the legal and ethical framework in which foreign policy -- and military action -- is formed and executed. Here's the agenda:

On his foreign policy goals before leaving office:
"I'm
going to keep on pushing because I want to make sure that when I turn
the keys over to the next president, that they have the ability, that he
or she has the capacity to — to make some decisions with a relatively
clean slate.

"Closing Guantanamo is one. Making sure that we
have the right legal architecture for how we conduct counterterrorism
and that there's greater transparency, as I discussed today, that's
another.
"Making sure that people have a sense that when we use
drones, we do so lawfully in a way that avoids civilian casualties and
in ways that are appropriate. Making sure that our national security
apparatus is – has, you know, enough legal checks and balances that
ordinary folks, not just here in the United States but around the world,
can feel assured that their privacy is being respected.

"You
know, these are all parts of what I consider a – a major piece of
business during my presidency, which is recognizing we've got very real
threats out there and we can't be naïve about protecting ourselves from
those threats."

Obama has voiced all these goals before, but as far as I know he's not invited judgment on the progress made by the time he leaves office. It's a tough set of marks to clear. With respect to Guantanamo, perhaps this year he'll prove serious in his threat to veto the National Defense Authorization Act if it does not end restrictions on the executive's power to transfer detainees. Re NSA surveillance, I suppose some watered down restrictions may pass Congress, and he can declare victory on that front. As for drone attacks, I'm not sure what Obama has in mind to convince other countries that U.S. use of this weapon is acceptably rule-based, or to deter other countries from following a perceived U.S. precedent of picking off perceived enemies at will. But the expressed willingness to be judged on his progress in these matters indicates that action is coming.

That agenda needs to be understood in the context of Obama's broader understanding of the country's place in the world, and the general state of world affairs. In the 2008 campaign, Obama took heat for suggesting that threats facing the U.S. were less ominous than those of the Cold War. Again in this interview, as in his West Point speech yesterday, Obama suggested that the world is a safer place than it's ever been and that the U.S. position is stronger -- if, paradoxically, less dominant -- than it's ever been. It's key to grasp that he sees the recalibration he's calling for as one undertaken from a position of strength. At a time when he's widely lambasted for foreign policy weakness (as was Eisenhower by anticommunist preocons), that takes a certain audacity. Listen:

Is there an overarching theme to his foreign policy, like President Reagan's opposition to communism?
"I'm
not sure I can do it in a sentence because we're fortunate in many
ways. We don't face an existential crisis. We don't face a civil war. We
don't face a Soviet Union that is trying to rally a bloc of countries
and that could threaten our way of life.

"Instead, what we have
is, as I say in the speech, this moment in which we are incredibly
fortunate to have a strong economy that is getting stronger, no military
peer that threatens us, no nation-state that anytime soon intends to go
to war with us. But we have a world order that is changing very rapidly
and that can generate diffuse threats, all of which we have to deal
with.

"And I think that the most important point of the speech
today for me is how we define American leadership in part is through our
military might, but only in part, that American leadership in the 21st
century is going to involve our capacity to build international
institutions, coalitions that can act effectively, and the promotion of
norms, rules, laws, ideals and values that create greater prosperity and
peace, not just in our own borders, but outside as well."

Political scientist Julia Avari, a close student of presidential rhetoric, recently asserted that Obama has failed to redefine domestic issues in a way that would offer the public "new ways of understanding" them. As a longtime admirer of Obama's rhetoric, I have it on my agenda to consider that charge more closely. Here, though, it strikes me that over time Obama has offered new ways of understanding America's place in the world: as first among equals in strengthening and in part reinventing multilateral institutions. Whether that redefinition has been backed up by action is another question: many critics sympathetic to his stated wish to demilitarize U.S. foreign policy would say no. But I have often been struck -- e.g., in the Goldblog interviews -- by the clarity and coherence of Obama's large foreign policy frame: placing current threats in perspective, and articulating the goal of multilateralist leadership.

P. S. I may be over-disposed to hearing echoes of Lincoln in Obama's utterances, but Obama has by his own testimony steeped himself in Lincoln's conduct and rhetoric. In any case, the conclusion of his goal-setting above, charging the U.S. with "the promotion of
norms, rules, laws, ideals and values that create greater prosperity and
peace, not just in our own borders, but outside as well," seems to me to evoke Lincoln's final injunction in his Second Inaugural: "let us strive on..to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

About Me

I'm a freelance writer focused mainly on the unfolding drama of Affordable Care Act implementation and health reform more generally.
I have a Ph.D. in medieval English literature and a propensity to parse the rhetoric and logic of our political leaders as well as that of media pundits and scholars who jump into the national debate. I wrote a dissertation on the remarkably humane and subtle medieval English anchorite Julian of Norwich, a mystic nun whose knack of squaring circles and framing paradoxes reminds me a little of our current president. A sampling of that work (mind the google gaps) is here: http://bit.ly/OzwsrR